The transmission and presentation of information using streaming delivery technology is rapidly increasing. Various forms of streaming technology and, in particular, hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) streaming, may employ adaptive bitrate streaming, in which a video stream is encoded using multiple renditions that may differ with respect to various transmission attributes (e.g., bitrates, resolutions, profiles, frame rates, etc.). A recipient may then determine which rendition to download depending on various transmission characteristics, such as network conditions (e.g., available network bandwidth, throughput, etc.), computational resources (e.g., recipient processor usage, recipient memory usage, etc.), decoder compatibility, and others. In adaptive bitrate streaming, video streams are encoded into small segments (typically 2-10 seconds), and each segment starts with an instantaneous decoder refresh frame (IDR-frame). An IDR-frame is a special intra-coded picture frame (I-frame) that flushes all reference pictures in the DPB (decoded picture buffer), so that no following video frames can reference any picture prior to the IDR-frame. This means that each segment is self-decodable (i.e., doesn't depend on reference pictures in previous segments). Also, segments of different renditions are perfectly time aligned (i.e., for segments of different renditions, the presentation timestamp (PTS) of the first frames as well as the durations are exactly same). Therefore, the recipient can switch from one rendition to another seamlessly.
One challenge related to adaptive bitrate streaming is the desire to reduce end-to-end latency while maintaining a sufficiently high video quality. In adaptive bitrate streaming, larger segment durations may tend to increase latency. Thus, one simple technique for reducing latency involves the reduction of segment duration. However, the reduction of segment duration may result in more frequent transmission of IDR-frames, which have large data sizes and are expensive and inefficient to encode. Thus, while reduction of segment duration may reduce latency, a resulting increased frequency of IDR-frames may result in negative effects, such as decreased image quality and image fidelity.